"I agree that I will: ... Complete all mid-terms and final exams with my own work and only my own work. I will not submit the work of any other person."

How does an online service like this guard against wholesale cheating to obtain certificates? On campus, it is possible to quiz the individual concerned, stuff like that, I don't see that happening here.

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

I too have registered. There are two ways of stopping plagiarism - using anti-plagiarism software or requiring work to be based on the person's own situation - for example, the Open University courses on which I taught systems ideas had assignments that required you to take measurements of your own house and lifestyle, use examples from your local newspaper or develop a project of your own.

It is very difficult to plagiarise someone else's work in those circumstances because you have to give answers in a series of assignments which are based on a unique set of facts related to you, facts which evolve as the course progresses in ways which you cannot predict - so anything you plagiarise becomes rather obvious.

As an external examiner I also spotted plagiarism because the student's writing style changed and because the references cited did not fit the arguments being made.

Sadly in several instances the quality of other work by the student showed that they had the ability to pass the course without the need to resort to plagiarism but sometimes students feel there is no other way.

I'm thinking not so much of individual plagiarism as organised fraud, say a bunch of people all buying their "knowledge" from the same gangster so they can get ahead in life, maybe get a job in a desirable country or with a desirable organisation, something like that.

Just because it hasn't happened much yet doesn't mean it won't happen a lot more when it gets to be a lot easier.

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

guy wrote:I'm thinking not so much of individual plagiarism as organised fraud, say a bunch of people all buying their "knowledge" from the same gangster so they can get ahead in life, maybe get a job in a desirable country or with a desirable organisation, something like that.

That may be possible with written exams, where papers are marked by different examiners, even different examining boards. But when all the papers are fed into the same computer system, spotting bought answers should be relatively simple.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

guy wrote:I'm thinking not so much of individual plagiarism as organised fraud, say a bunch of people all buying their "knowledge" from the same gangster so they can get ahead in life, maybe get a job in a desirable country or with a desirable organisation, something like that.

That may be possible with written exams, where papers are marked by different examiners, even different examining boards. But when all the papers are fed into the same computer system, spotting bought answers should be relatively simple.

To build on what Johnhudson and Nelz wrote. Here is a snippet from the OU's plagiarism policy

To check students are working in a fair and academically appropriate manner, The Open University uses two types of text comparison software to detect potential cases of plagiarism in work that is submitted for assessment. These are:•CopyCatchwhich compares work submitted by one student with assignments submitted by all other students on the module (as well as previous presentations of the module where appropriate). The main use of CopyCatch is to check for cases of collusion.•Turnitin, which carries out the equivalent of an internet search, looks for matches between the text included in a piece of work submitted by a student with all forms of information and resources publicly available on the internet. The main use ofTurnitin is to check for cases of direct copying, and/or not properly referencing various types of source materials.It can also be used to compare each student’s assignments with the module materials and other commonly used or provided references.

OK, so let me try to explain again. I am not talking about simple plagiarism. I am thinking professional doppelganger - effectively organised crime. They create your site ID, they do the course work for you and collect your money, you get the certificate for their work. They are professional enough, and well enough resourced, to avoid the plagiarism trap. They write their own software to automatically generate as much of the course work as they can, with unique output on each run.

Something just not worth considering for a traditional course, but once automated....

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

It would have to be very sophisticated software to write grammatically correct English is various styles. I'm not saying it's not possible, but that level of coding skill could probably earn more in other ways - like selling the code to the Daily Mail

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

Didn't we have a spammer on here once offering to sell coursework essays. Not sure what the basis of the scheme was, but I'm sure English literate people from the sub-continent might well be inclined to earn some extra cash by doing such work for dumb-but-wealthy westerners.